


from one end to the other

by twnkwlf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe-Everyone Dies, Angst, Depression, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Suicide, Stydia, Tragedy, mentions of self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-08 00:55:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twnkwlf/pseuds/twnkwlf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She took him away to a house on a hill because there was nothing left for him. There was no one. There was nothing. There was this house on a hill, and all the hours she could give him, and that's it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	from one end to the other

 

* * *

 

 

Note: Exerpt at beginning is from River Swimmers by Raechel Dadd

Fic based on [this AU](http://varicose.tumblr.com/post/72692066249/teen-wolf-au-when-everyone-dies-stiles-and-lydia) 

[Companion mix](http://8tracks.com/varicose/from-one-end-to-the-other)

I wanted to write some very sad Stydia and I got carried away. This story contains mentions of suicide, depression, self harm. 

  

* * *

 

 

_we are silent maniacs counting in our heads_

_we are overseers_

_and this ocean will kill us_

_if we do not hold our noses_

_on the way down_

 

All she could hear was the thrum if an engine under her body, and the unhealthy persistence of an unhealthy silence.

Stiles was asleep against the car window. It was a long drive to the cottage.

Lydia didn’t even turn on the radio.

 

* * *

 

The first thing he did was listen to her mumble about the house, as she threw down her keys to make a clatter.

"My dad's family usually comes here in the summer, but they're in Cabo this year, so…

“The kitchen is here, and the bedrooms are down that hall. There's a loft up there with a TV. Bathroom's right here."

When she met his eyes, they were uninterested. He had been unplugged. He was a dead battery.

Then he dragged the duffle bag of his clothes toward the bedroom like it was a ball at the end of his chain. She followed him tentatively, a few steps creaking behind him, staring at the walls, at the framed photographs and artwork from another life. She hadn’t been here since before her parent’s divorce. It was such a far away thing, a ghost of a memory, like she was walking through a poorly constructed dream.

"Tired," he said when he saw the quilted bed in her old room.

"Yeah, okay. Um...call me if you need--"

"Yeah," he said, shutting the door.

The first thing Lydia did, with a sinking, heavy stomach, was gather up all the knives in the kitchen. She hid them in a box on a shelf, high up, like choking hazards from babies.

 

* * *

 

That night, Lydia hovered at his door to listen for breathing and snoring. She thought she heard the bed quake under his turning body, which was assurance enough that he was still there, hadn’t jumped out the window.

In her own room, she kept the door wide open because maybe he would need her at some point in the night. Maybe he would step into the role she'd assembled by dragging him here, become her burden.

And she tossed in her bed, eyes always drifting to the door, out the hall, to the dark that didn't stir once that night.

 

* * *

 

He slept the whole next day as well.

It gave her the time to wander from the porch, to look out at the hills, the trees and plains that dipped low to meet a dirt road. The dirt road led to a lake where there were more cottages along its shore. This house up on the hill was unique, and isolated from the others, and her favorite place when she was a little girl. She had once brought her friends here for sleepovers and vacation weekends.

She took him away to a house on a hill because there was nothing left for him. There was no one. There was nothing. There was this house on a hill, and all the hours she could give him, and that's it.

She didn’t linger for very long outside. Instead, something dragged her back into the pale light of the house like a tether pulling on her middle.

 

* * *

 

She applied liner to one eye carefully, holding her lid open, when he came into the bathroom in the morning. He was dishevelled, wearing the same clothes he’d been sleeping in for three days, hair stuck up and skin shiny with oil. She stopped and stared at his reflection in the mirror, standing behind her.

He pulled aside the shower curtain.

“Turn around?” he asked. His voice was cracked like a smoker’s.

She faced the other wall, but watched him changing in the corner of the mirror. He was white and frail, but still so tall, and distinct. There was a pattern of of moles curving up his back and to his chest, as she often wondered about.  It was odd to see so much. Had she ever seen more than just the skin of his arms?

When he closed the curtain, and the rushing white noise of water started, she turned back to her own face.

She wiped away the make-up.

 

* * *

 

They ate like post-apocalyptic survivors.

Canned Tuna, an old box of pasta, no sauce, and only once a day.

Apocalypse felt like the right word for it.

It was the silence, really. He didn’t snore, didn’t stir, didn’t say a thing, hardly. She stood on the porch, and stepped down the creaky wood listening for something in the quiet. In the early, early mornings, when she woke from the couch where she’d passed out the night before, she would hear nothing, not even the birds. It made it as though she was alone there.

If Allison was alive, maybe she would hear her running up the dirt lane, crunching gravel, panting from her morning run.

Lydia found herself breathing louder just to make a sound.

 

* * *

 

Five days, and she was out of books to read and out of minor distractions, of things to fill her days.

She was out of food to leave at his door.

They would have to drive to town no matter what, but she didn’t know how she could get up and move herself let alone move him. In the afternoon, her stomach ached, empty, and so she slipped into his room.

He slept face down with his arms tucked near his head, like an imitation of a helmet. Lydia didn’t know if he was even asleep. He could just been idle there, without his shirt, loved by the soft sheets of her old bedroom, lying there and not doing a thing.

“We have to go to the market,” she said, and it sounded more like a command then she’d meant it to.

Moving to the curtains, she watched his chest rise and fall. When she let the light in, it went from grey to garish, but he didn’t even register the change.

“Come on, _Stiles._..please…”

Nothing.

She sat on the edge of the bed, near his feet.

“Stiles, get up. We really have to go to the market. It’s...a ten minute drive.”  

Her voice cracked.

“Get up. Stiles.”

She didn’t know what to do, so she poked at his legs. His eyes were open, blinking, and his chest was still rising and falling, but he would not move or listen or obey her. She took his foot and pulled.

“Stiles!”

Then panic rushed through her chest like a faucet was turned on and she stood, gripping his leg and pulling at his body so it would shift, so it would move away from the bed in any way at all. She wasn’t strong enough to heave all of him down, so she pulled and dragged him lopsided on the mattress, grunting, flushing with a splotchy red face. In a comedy movie, this might seem funny. But it wasn’t funny. It was very sad. She tugged once more, and she slipped on a blanket and fell down on her ass.

There on the floor, she began to cry.

After a minute, he sat up to face the window, squinting at the sun, and the light played on his chest.

“Why don’t you just go to the market?” he asked her quietly, holding a hand to his face. He still avoided her eyes.

“I’m afraid--” she pulled herself onto her knees, thinking about the box of knives on the shelf. “To leave you alone.”

 

* * *

 

They hadn’t been around this many people in what felt like years. She found herself walking through the aisles with the cart, awkward, strange, new. Stiles followed behind her.

She contemplated a box of cereal when Stiles stopped pacing up and down the aisles, and just stood in front of the Cheerios

“You want Cheerios?” she asked.

His finger grazed the box.

“Dad…” he said, and it struck a chord in her like a jump-scare, hearing him say that. “I made him eat it for his heart. Low cholesterol.”

There might have been the slightest of smiles on the corner of his lip, flashing in his eyes for just a half-second before his face crippled. Then he was sagging toward the ground with that pinched, shredded face. She dropped the things in her hands and caught him in her arms.

“Oh, God, God…” he moaned, and he shoved her back into the display of Lucky Charms, but she sprang back to him. When he twirled in a manic circle, he pulled on his hair with both hands, white knuckled. She took his arms and he unraveled toward her more easily. She mouthed his name. When he fell forward, long arms wrapped almost twice around her back.

She just squeezed and squeezed like she could wring him out, drain him of it. He sobbed louder than she’d ever heard. Crazed. Fucking crazy. They cried like that in the center of the cereal aisle, gripped like velcro until their muscles shook. People were probably going to get the manager or gathering around like it was a scene, but it wasn’t a scene.

Lydia rubbed her face and her hands and her whole body against his, as if she she could just be enough, and her own chest went light from the contact of him, of another human, like she’d been missing this. She didn’t care if it was selfish.

The rope in her heart went slack. He uncoiled in her hands.

“ _I can’t...do it_ ,” he whispered into her cheek.

“I know,” she groaned.

 

* * *

 

A monster had once called her a monster. A banshee.

She remembered a time when Scott and her made a little pact together. She believed that he was good enough to help her, good enough to act on the itchy, hot warnings she felt in her chest, waiting to be released like a scream. That feeling had been like a whip crack on her sternum  when she felt it, for a week before it happened. Scott was supposed to help her, to help her keep the dead bodies she dreamed of alive. He must have tried to stop it.

She dreamed about their bodies sometimes. She dreamed about the scream that had climbed out of her chest the night, before they died, when she felt that it was happening. The worst sound she’d ever made. A blackout sound. She walked about the little cottage at night, hearing echoes of that death scream like some hear the echoes of a funny joke they heard once, causing them to laugh.

She watched Stiles sleep.

She wondered if he dreamed about cancer that killed his mother, the demons that killed his father.

 

 

* * *

 

Lydia spent the night in his bed, which smelled like sweat and dust. For the first few hours, she was afraid to touch him, but near midnight he turned suddenly toward her with a puffy, red face. Sniffling and chest still shaking with tired, half-ass sobs, he bent his head to put against her arm.

She tugged his face to her chest, where it was softer.

She tangled her hands in his hair.

 

 

* * *

 

She understood the allure of this bed. She understood how he could melt into it all day. In the morning, she refused to move out from under his arm. She lied down with him for hours, until the morning slipped into the afternoon, and her whole body was almost numb. He would drift in and out because there was no way to be asleep forever, but sometimes she slipped away and woke up to find the light had moved farther away from her in the room. His eyes would blink, slow, sad, to look at her.

Sad, but content.

She woke up a little delirious, sometime around midnight, when the room was dark blue. He was still asleep beside her.

There was a deep ache in her lower belly. A good kind of ache. She pried her hand from under her pillow and almost absently rested it on top of her underwear. After a long moment, her heart pounded furiously, nervous. She was inches away...a twitch away from her clit.

She turned her head to the side and checked that Stiles was asleep. His head faced her, but his eyes were closed, lashes stark on his cheek. She swallowed deep, breathed through her nose, dared to slip into her underwear and spread herself apart. It was hard not to widen her legs more, not to arch into it when she pressed down tightly bound fingers. She moved about herself in circles.

And it was the most electric thing-- like a current running through a body of water. She heard her breath hitching and stuttering in her lungs. This was scary. It was so good and so scary, and she just wanted to climb the fear until she died. She wanted to dig her other hand inside herself to fill her completely. She wanted to wake him and feel thick, heavy, hot skin sliding into her, soaking her, killing her slowly--

She snapped her head to the side again and this time, Stiles’s eyes were opened.

She stopped moving. She lay frozen with her hand in her cunt and her eyes watering from the whining, needy pain of stopping. She met his comprehending eyes, and her heart...it was crashing inside her.

Then she felt him lift his hand from his hip. He rested it on her stomach, above her waist, heavy and warm there, tickling her arm that was still thrust under the covers. She saw him give the slightest inclination of his head.

She started again, moving her fingers slowly, catching back up with the tension. She couldn’t break away from his eyes. She couldn’t handle it. Her hand sped as he pressed down on her belly, holding her in place and she let her breath disguise a groan from deep in her chest as her fingers slipped around, too wet, too erratic. He watched her with his mouth slightly parted.

A thousand pounds of pressure pressed on her.

And she whispered,

“I’m coming, I’m coming…”

She closed her eyes when she did because it was a blinding, white explosion, and her whole body would have risen if Stiles wasn’t holding her still. She gasped and sucked in air desperately, booming and booming in shock, and pulse, and spasm until it stopped, slowly, drawing her down.

She was too scared to open her eyes again.

His hand stayed on her belly until they fell back asleep.

 

* * *

 

She watched the coffee brew and watched the eggs cook, she watched the sun rise and the condensation slip away from the windows, and she watched the hallway, waiting for Stiles to come out at the smell of food.

When he did, he took the frying pan from the stove wordlessly and pulled two plates from the cupboard. She leaned against the counter as he served them, handing hers to her first. She hummed in thanks.

Her stomach was knotted in a different way. Embarrassment. The memory of the orgasm. His eyes on her the whole time.

They ate standing by the stove, glancing up every now and then.

He finished most of the food and then set down the plate, taking hers from her hands suddenly and setting it down as well, and then in that fluid motion, he leaned all the way to her face and kissed her lips, slack and slow, like he was very unsure.

Until she pulled him back by his neck and kissed him for real.

A real kiss. Wet tongues, teeth, tightly held breath. It was relieving.

When he pulled away from her, he said,

“I can’t stop thinking about it. Last night…”

“Do it to me,” she whispered into his mouth. They shared hot breath.

“I…” he closed his eyes, wincing.

Maybe it was in bad taste. Maybe you weren’t supposed to want this when everyone you loved was gone. Maybe you were meant to only want them back, and to let it consume your days, your hours, your seconds, and every cell in your body. Only it wasn’t true, because she could see how Stiles’s cheeks were patchy with red blood. And if it were true, Lydia was fucked anyway. She wanted sensation. She wanted his skin and his spit and his come because it was a real thing, a solid thing, a thing that could occupy all this time they were wasting. She could feel his heart bumping in his throat and she kissed it, tipping his head back, dragging her lips all over him. They had so many hours to kill.

“It’s okay,” she said.

He kissed her again and again, coming up for air often. He hadn’t kissed many people before, and she felt the timid press of his tongue, the awkward settling of his hands on her waist. She thumbed his hip bone, took the back of his head with her hand.

Widening her legs, she pulled him between them, and moved up so that her ass was pressed against the counter and he could feel everything between her thighs moving in little shakes and circles. She reached for his waistband and pulled his pants down a little. She heard him him whine as her hand touched him through the boxers.

He was brave enough to peel up her skirt. and she urged him to hook his fingers into her underwear, pull them down enough. He stared at her nakedness for a moment.

“It’s okay,” she said again. She allowed herself only a second of that awkward exposure, when she became too aware of her own body against his, but his face looked more relaxed than anything.

It was quick. She wanted it to happen. She pulled his dick from his pants and he was already hard and red. She pushed his hips toward hers, and took his virginity while kissing his cheek, pushing him into her all the way.

He got his bearings after a moment, staying still inside her until she started to squirm against him, and he pulled out of her completely, staring down at her again,  at himself, at the place where he’d been inside her. She kicked the skirt down her legs, and she pulled his shirt from his chest while he panted, still watching.

She didn’t have to pull him back to her this time. He took her hips and angled them toward his cock, and she hitched up her leg so that he could push into her again. He groaned.

She watched his face a mess with concentration and sweat-- it was the most emotion she’d seen on him in weeks. She moved herself up and then he pushed into her again, and then again, until he started to build a speed, still sloppy, he slipped out of her a few times, frustratedly trying to make rhythm. Rhythm was something they could learn. For now, she felt her lungs expanding with the wonderful, terrible distraction this offered.  She touched herself while he fucked her, building up a skyscraper inside herself that would crumble at any moment. She cried with little sighs and he was grunting into her shoulder, biting her, about to come.

She felt him hold her down again, hold her down while he stayed inside her and came with a stutter-shout. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

 

* * *

 

In bed, she sat in his lap and they slowly fucked because it was the third time and their legs were shaking, and they had built up a tolerance to themselves, and it was taking more and more to get there. She watched his face the whole time, obsessed with it. She showed him her breasts and he put his mouth on them, while doing what she said with his fingers to get her off, squirming as they clumsily writhed in the sheets.

They did it once more lying down, with his weight on top of her and his fingers knotted in her hair.

When coming was almost painful, they stopped, and she felt truly tired for the first time in a while. She slept on his chest, and he tickled her arm softly. _Thank God for this_ , she thought.

 

* * *

 

He went with her to buy food the next time. They drove quietly through countryside and Stiles watched the scenery fly past them. Their hands touched near the console, not holding, but touching.

Lydia turned on the radio.

 

* * *

 

He still lied down for most of the day, and they didn’t talk much, except for when he asked her one afternoon,

“What is this about?”

He held up the book she’d just finished. She summarized the plot and the conversation felt so normal that her heart beat slower. He sat next to her on the couch in the loft while she flipped through the four channels on the TV. She watched his face relax as he read, and stuck her feet under his thighs to warm them.

That night, she talked him through going down on her, and he liked it more than anything they’d done yet. He came on his own while he moved his tongue up and down her, grinding into the sheets.

 

* * *

 

She took him to the lake even though he seemed like he didn’t want to go. He was letting her mould him, drag him, carry him where she wanted. The sandy side of the beach was filled with families from the cottages and lake houses. They stretched out in the sun, lying on towels. After a while, he took his shirt off and even let her smooth sunblock on his back.

It was the first time in a long time that they were surrounded by people, and the contrast between them and the happy families was almost black and white, but Lydia craved it.

“Let’s go swimming,” she said. He looked tired. She wanted to wake him up.

He followed her into the water and held her hand as they got a bit deeper, and when it was near their waist, a beach ball drifted in their path.

Stiles tucked it under his arm.

The ball belonged to a small girl on the shore and she was crying about it until she saw them walking out of the water. She reached out for it and Stiles gave the ball a little volleyball bump which she missed, and chased after. She kicked the ball back to him, giggling. It descended into Stiles chasing after her little kicks and her failing to catch his throws, which made her giggles louder and louder. Lydia sat back on her towel and wrung out her hair, wondering if this feeling, airy and light, could last.

“He’s really great with her,” said a voice beside Lydia. She looked over to the umbrella and towel set up next to her. Two women sat in beach chairs with picnic baskets and magazines.

“Oh,” Lydia said, surprised. She hadn’t actually spoken to another person in months. “He’s just...a big kid, really.”

She remembered when that was true, when Stiles was spastic and jumpy, and fast paced like a little boy. She watched him cheer a little when the girl caught the ball in her arms.

“I haven’t seen you around before, did you just move into one of the new lake houses on the eastside?”

“No, we’re down the road. Family house.”

“Ah, you must be out near Welsely Woods, that’s nice. I’m Katie,” she said, reaching the distance to shake Lydia’s hand. “This is my wife, Hannah.”

The other woman waved, but she was keeping an eye on Stiles and the little girl.

“Lydia,” she said.

“That’s your husband?” Katie asked. Stiles was coming back to the towels with the little girl in tow.

Lydia took Stiles’s hand as he sat down next to her. She felt the impulsive urge to lie.

“This is my husband, Stiles,” she said, introducing them, squeezing his hand. She felt him quirk his eyebrows next to her.

“Nice to meet you,” he said quietly. He pointed to the girl. “She’s cute.”

The little girl trotted over to sit near Stiles, holding a bucket and shovels. She started to dig little holes.

While Stiles helped her build a sandcastle, Lydia chatted with Katie and Hannah about the wine country near the lake, and the tasting trips they’d been on before. When Katie stood up, Lydia saw that there was a small bump in her middle, and Katie caught her staring.

“Four months,” she said, patting the bump. “No more wine for me.”

They invited Stiles and Lydia to come over for dinner sometime, told them where their house sat on the lake, and that they had barbeque parties on Saturdays where the whole cottage line came. It was a shred of normal.

 

* * *

 

It got to be normal, taking off her clothes, taking off his. They were fucking in the tossed bed that evening, after the beach, before dinner, when Stiles said,

“So I’m your husband, huh?”  between breaths. “Why’d you say that?”

He didn’t stop moving around inside of her, and she didn’t stop rolling her hips.

“I don’t know,” she said looking down at their bodies, where their hips met.

He thrust her back against the pillows, more powerful. The sweat on his forehead met hers, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

“I’ve wanted to marry you since I was eight years old.”

She dug her nails into his back because she was coming close, almost there, with her heart drowning in her ears and his voice going somewhere deeper inside her. She arched up to press her whole body on his whole body.

And after, she pulled his head over to her chest like every night, petting his hair, feeling his lips on her fingers, smelling him and becoming forgetful, for those long moments, that the world outside the bed wasn’t this smooth.

He tipped up his head and kissed her long and deep, until they needed breath.

“I used to think about marrying you all the time,” he said. “Scott would be my best man. My dad and mom would sit at the front of the church, you know, like in the movies. crying and shit. All proud.”

She felt a frown tugging at the corner of her lip. She tried to draw up some image of him, small and spindly, but all she had was a picture she’d seen offhandedly of his little boy legs and his little boy smile. When she was a girl, he was just a boy in her class who was faceless and small. She knew he pined after her. Lots of boys pined after Lydia and it was nothing special, and he would get a girlfriend, and he would get over it like all the other boys.

Until everything was special, and wolves happened, and Peter Hale happened, and she could feel death like it was a stink following her around, and her boyfriend was a killer, and Scott was there to help, and Allison was there to stress with her over the details of their twisted lives, and Isaac, and Erica, and Boyd, and Derek, and Ethan, and Aiden, and Stiles, Stiles.

They were all fixtures.

But he was the only fixture left.

“It’s just you and me now and that’s why this is happening, right?” he asked, like he was reading her mind.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly.

If all those loved people were still alive, maybe Lydia wouldn’t feel this way about him, but it didn’t matter, because she felt like he was sewn into her, and she would not rip the stitches. She wouldn’t dare touch them.

“I love you,” she said. “I do.”  She didn’t care why. He started to say something, but she interrupted him. “I love you so much. I love you _so much_.”

He breathed through his nostrils the way he always did when he was overwhelmed.

It was the kind of love that can’t be felt. It was the kind of thing that hardly existed. It was in their heads and their eyes, and in the way that they came together, and in the way that she knew what his eyelashes felt like on her breast.

 

* * *

 

Two more weeks passed and the end of summer was starting. Out in the treeline, there was a single patch of leaves that was bright red.

They went for a walk in the woods that smelled different from the Beacon Hill preserve, more like bark and dew, and less like rot. He held her hand, interlocked like he might lose her in here, like kids on a field trip. She wondered if this walk through the familiar shapes of trees would set him off, make him reminisce. He seemed fine.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Yeah.”

“It’s just...the woods are like...maybe it’s too much. We can go back.”

She touched his chest.

“No, I think I like it out here,” she said. They watched a bird fly low, until it almost swooped into their heads and they jumped aside, frightened in the good way

“Me too,” he said.

 

* * *

 

She stared up at a full moon one night, lying on the porch with him. He read another one of her books and was flipping back and forth through the pages, his head resting on her thigh while she leaned against the banister, sipping on coffee, trying to stay awake.

She didn’t think of wolves, looking up at it. She thought of blood.

She thought of those old indigenous terms for menstruation-- she’d learned them in a history class a thousand years ago. They called it _moontime_ and you couldn’t smudge if you were bleeding, and there were ancient feminine rituals that tied into the moon, that had nothing to do with evil.

It slid into place in her brain and her heart at the same time, because she hadn’t seen blood between her legs since...since...she didn’t even know. And it thundered in her ears how he came inside of her almost every night, without forward thought.

So she stared up at the full moon, and felt herself shift, unlike a wolf, into something else that was deeper, more ancient, more worrisome, even.

 

* * *

 

“We can just grab some food. Something to drink.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s just to be polite.”

“I don’t mind.”

They were going to go to Katie and Hannah’s cottage party, the last one of the summer, because it seemed like a plausible thing to do, something normal that they were capable of. Stiles put on a nice looking T-shirt and said he would go with her because she suspected that he wanted something normal, the way she wanted something normal. Normal things were a blessing-- like how they’d had a wireless internet router installed and were enrolled in a few online classes for the fall.

At the party, she watched him drift toward the kids who screamed and laughed. A few other men were there, and they looked like dads, and Stiles joined in playing volleyball on the sandy patch of beach behind Katie’s house.

She found Katie talking with some other women in the kitchen. The bump had grown. She was introduced to a round of women who were older and had no idea that werewolves existed.

“Hey, can I get you drink?” Katie asked her.  

“Actually, I need a favor.”

Katie and her walked toward the living room, which was less crowded, where someone’s overweight husband was passed out on the couch with a beer in his hand. Lydia awkwardly played with the ring she’d slipped on her left finger that morning.

“Do you have a pregnancy test, by any chance?”

Katie raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, dozens. Come on, sweetie.”

She guided her into a bathroom that sparkled clean and dug out a box from under the sink.

“I’m just--” Lydia tried to explain why she didn’t have her own pee stick. “I just don’t want to freak him out. Yet.”

“How old are you two?”

She answered honestly.

“Nineteen.”

“Well...you both seem much older. If it’s any consolation.”

She thanked her and Katie left.

And she peed on the stick, and it was positive like she knew it would be.

And she wanted to have an abortion immediately because the pressure was too much.

And Stiles drove the car home later, and reached for her hand because he could probably tell something was wrong.

And that night, they spooned and he moved softly in and out of her, and she pressed her face into the pillow to hide the tears. He came and she didn’t, which was strange for them, so he held her shoulder with concern.

“What happened?” he asked her.

It was a bad day.

He had bad days sometimes.

So could she.

 

* * *

 

She slipped out of bed early one morning, a few days later. She had Katie drive her to the doctors office in town, and she felt strange sitting in the car with someone who was having a baby. Katie asked her,

“Are you sure I can’t come in with you?”

“I’ll be fine, they just want to make sure I have a ride home.”

“Lydia--”

“Thank you so much, Katie. Really.”

Lydia was asked a hundred questions, and they offered to go over the other options with her, and they gave her literature on mental health, she signed the necessary papers. They stripped her down to a medical gown and examined her stomach, took her blood, took an ultrasound of a patchy blotch that she’d been picturing. They said she was four weeks along.

The nurse and doctor came in with a pill inside a dixie cup that she would take now, and then another pill that she would take at home, and it would make her bleed and cramp, and be empty again. They explained everything pragmatically, the way she would have wanted if this had happened in another life. She once thought Jackson got her pregnant, when they were 15. She had set up the appointment under a false name and everything, but then she got her period. It could have been a miscarriage. She’d ignored the whole situation, which was stupid, but easier than this. Easier than this.

When they tried to hand her the water to take the pill, her hands shook too much. She stared at the nurse for a moment and she raised an eyebrow at Lydia, pulling the dixie cup back, looking like the kind of woman who had seen the way Lydia’s face was bent with confusion a thousand times in a thousand girls who sat on this examination bed.

Lydia gave the smallest shake of her head.

In the end, she phoned Stiles.

He picked her up a half-hour later, where she was waiting outside of the clinic, wondering what they had done with the little pills.

“You didn’t tell me you needed to see a doctor?” he asked her when she climbed in.

“I’m alright.”

“This is a women's clinic,” he said, looking up at the sign.

Then a few seconds later, he said,

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

They drove home in silence. No radio. No handholding. Lydia didn’t know if this was a bad day or not. She really didn’t know what she was doing at all.

 

* * *

 

If they were doing it then it wasn’t spoken about. It was something that was happening on the sidelines. A baby. A child. Someone else.  

Later in the week, Stiles had picked up her prescriptions of prenatal vitamins from the pharmacy and left them on the counter. He didn’t go to the follow up appointments she had scheduled with Katie’s midwife. There was a small birthing clinic near the hospital in the town over and they gave Lydia a small picture of the baby in her belly, and it looked just like every ultrasound photo ever taken, but she pinned it to the refrigerator when she got home. Stiles stared at it for a long time while making food for dinner, eyes always drifting back to look at it.

“Should we be paying for this place?” Stiles asked one night, very late. “Should we be renting it?”

“Dad used to rent it in the summers, but it’s paid for.”

“I feel like we’re squatting.”

Lydia thought that seemed apt, except the lines between homeless and at home were blurring since they had lived here, for almost three months. This place smelled of them.

She called her mother the next day, who she’d been keeping in lazy touch with for the summer though texts and emails. She told her that she was taking some pre-requisite classes online for the next year before she figured out school. Her mother sounded unpleased, but distracted. She didn’t mention being pregnant yet.

She said the same thing to her father in an email. She told him she wanted the cottage for the year, that she would pay for the gas in the winter, for electricity, but he was the type of father who spoiled, and she was allowed to stay as long as she remained officially enrolled in a school.

They got their textbook in the mail the next week, and opening the brown packages to reveal chemistry theory and physics books felt almost too familiar to stomach.

She started to be violently ill in the evenings, especially, late at night. She woke, vomiting on the sheets one night and Stiles helped her to the bathroom, cleaned her and held back her hair, washed her in the bathtub while he stifled yawns.

She felt him circle the cloth around her stomach, where it was still flat, staring into her bellybutton like it was a black hole. Maybe it was. She held his hand steady.

 

* * *

 

Somedays, they did work in the library in town, having changed their official address, they got trivial little library cards and read in their spare time, submitted online assignments. Stiles didn’t seem to care much about his grade, but she needed to keep that one thing about herself the same. She received A’s like little reassurances. She held the bump on her belly and felt happy about those things.

Stiles asked her one night,

“Can I come to your appointment tomorrow?”

She pulled up her shirt to reveal the swell that four months had made. He put his hand on her stomach. His fingers stretched far and warmed her skin. She wondered if it felt that, deep inside her.

He was a lot softer with her when they had sex, out of fear, even when she yelled at him to go harder. The orgasms were achingly slow that night, breathing heavy against his ear. Her belly touched his now, even when she arched away from him.

 

* * *

 

He came home with a crib. They manouvered the bed out of the spare room, and she couldn’t lift the mattress, so she watched, laughing as Stiles tried to shove it up the stairs of the loft. He looked like how he used to look; spastic, flailing, red-faced.

The room was simple and bare. A wooden crib with soft yellow sheets in one corner, and a changing table that had cost far too much money against the far wall.

She contemplated paint chips, but it reminded her very suddenly of the times she’d decorated Allison’s room. She braced her head against the wall, pressing it into the teal square that she was sure would be the right color.

 

* * *

 

When they walked, hand in hand, people were very unassuming. They were a young couple. Newlyweds, maybe. She looked very pregnant and he looked tired, and they were as common as anyone, shopping for clothes and groceries, her hair tied back lazily and his t-shirt wrinkled.

They didn’t know that they had been up all night before, because he had a nightmare and almost pushed her out of bed, and he couldn’t fall back asleep because the little void inside of him was circulating. The sadness moved around them like it was controlled by gravity, like a solar system. Sometimes, it was Mercury. Sometimes it was Jupiter, passing them over like an eclipse.

 

* * *

 

It took convincing to make her parents believe that she was fine, and being independent, and smart about her future. They wanted her to come home, to consider another option, to resume her normal life. They wanted her to go about being a young mother in the usual sense, full of shame and struggle.

They finished their online courses right around the time the baby came. It was spring. Flowers were opening up and so was Lydia. She was meant to walk around to get the labour started because her back was curved with the weight in her middle, and the baby was a week overdue. She didn’t like being this pregnant. It felt as though she was always full. They took a stroll into the woods near the house, early. Stiles held hot coffee and her hand.

“He never said, but I think my dad wanted grandkids. A lot of them,” he said.  

She wrapped her arm around his waist as they walked, leaning on him for more support. Every step was pins and needles on her swollen feet, but she kept on.

“Can you imagine Scott’s face?” she asked. “He’d probably throw the baby shower.”

Stiles laughed, sharp and intense. He sniffled.

“Allison and Scott would’ve been good godparents.”

She squeezed his hand for what wasn’t.

She took a nap that afternoon, and when she woke, she thought she was having me braxton hicks pains, but they became too evenly spaced, so Stiles phoned the midwife with shaky hands and drove her to the birthing clinic with a duffle bag in the backseat. He tapped on the steering wheel nervously.

She didn’t want to ask him because she didn’t want to know herself; are you scared? A swollen belly was one thing. She imagined giving birth and hating it, or maybe him, taking off with the car and never coming back. She imagined the worse. It was painful.

More painful.

The most painful.

No amount of back massaging could make it let go. Tight, groaning spasms in the pit of her abdomen. She cried against his shoulder, half leaning off the bed digging her nails into some flesh, not sure if it was hers or his. It went on.

For the few minutes of relief that came, she watched hip tap on his chin. Nervous, nervous.

She dilated quickly. The head had moved down mostly on its own over the course of the night.

Her chest burned with the constant promise of more pain. Another contraction slammed into her and it was time to get it out, to get the pain away, to get that body out of her body. The baby slid out in a surprise, after a few minutes of pushing. It just came and fell into the midwife’s open hand, and was scooped into her arm, and then Lydia lied back so the baby could be placed on her chest where it cried, and cried, and cried. It was very red and hot. She was red and hot. It was a girl, Stiles said at some point.

She inspected what she could for the frantic moments that the baby was a weight on her chest. It wasn’t enough time to take her in completely. The midwife had the cord cut and took her to be cleaned a little, which left Lydia staring at Stiles because the past few minutes felt like a tornado of things. She needed some kind of anchor. He came and sat beside her hip, wedged between her and the rails of the bed. She shook.

And she missed the weight on her chest.

She had to deliver the afterbirth, but then they gave the baby back to her, and this time she could look at her pinched face better, her shaking chin, the mixture of paleness and pinkness on her face. She had blondish hair that would probably turn brown.

Stiles stared, too.

They just stared. That’s all there was to do.

 

* * *

 

Stiles liked to stay awake more than her.

She remembered when he liked to sleep, when he was asleep all day, even, but now it was her wanted to waste the daylight in the sheets, and to feed her half asleep, curved into her arm, and to have Stiles rub his fingertips into her scalp so she could relax.

He stayed up with Claire and the television and the crying. He prepared the little bottles and fed her while he walked around the house, or out onto the porch. He talked to her. She never could hear what he was saying because he was so quiet about it, but always talking to her, making funny faces. They took baths together, all three of them. She would kick her little legs to splash them.

They loved her because she was their baby, like their parents and the ones before them. She had soft cheeks and round fists, and a little tongue that was stained white. She prefered to suck on Stiles’s fingers. She liked Lydia’s voice. Sleep schedules were hard, but everything else was easier than she thought it would be. She was easy to love. She was a strange, simple addition, and additions had been so rare for them.

 

* * *

 

He told her that they needed to go back. He whispered it in the dead of night, with Claire asleep on his chest, drooling onto his t-shirt.

She felt it poking at her middle, but unlike a tether, it was a fleeting feeling of homesickness, gone the next, replaced by fear. She dragged her finger along Claire’s little body. She nodded into the pillow; met his eyes in the dark.

So in the summer, they drove through the edge of Beacon Hills with the baby asleep in the back, to the places where nightmares lived. Stiles had let the bank claim his house to pay off debt, and now a single mother lived there, had decorated the lawn with chalk and balls and toys.

They drove past Jackson’s old house too, and she wondered idly about him and what he was doing. They steered clear of the woods and the Hale property.

Instead, they went to her house that was now more covered in vines than before. Prada, her little dog from another life, waddled to her legs and barked against her.

Her mother met her daughter, and she quietly poked at the question of college, but under the pretense of the baby in her hands. She said to Lydia, in the kitchen, making tea,

“I can’t believe it, Lydia.”

She couldn’t pretend that she knew what to say. Her mother kept on talking.

“I know...this year has been hard on you. And that boy, especially...I…” she threw a glance over her shoulder, where they could see Stiles letting Prada sniff Claire. “I didn’t want this for you.”

“Would you believe me if I said I wanted this?” Lydia poured water into bone china. “I can always get a degree, but she comes first.”

Her mother looked at he like she’d missed her, a long moment of sadness and eye watering. She shook her head a little.

“She’s beautiful.”

Stiles held her arm while they went to her room, still in the state it was left in. There were pictures on the walls, photos of Allison and Isaac, Scott and Stiles. They unravelled around her.

Sitting on her old bed, they kissed softly. She was too afraid to speak much. Stiles just blinked at her decorated walls until the sound of Claire’s crying from downstairs made his ears perk.

And after tea with her mom, they sat in the car again, a little disoriented.

“We should get some flowers,” he said.

 

* * *

 

The build up had been fear, but now that they stepped slowly though the graves together, Lydia felt nothing but an old, timeless ache. The aching wasn’t much to be afraid of. She didn’t want to let go of Claire, but as they approached Scott’s stone, Stiles reached out for her.

She cooed a little, settling into her fathers arms. Lydia set the new flowers against old, dead ones, where it said,

_SCOTT MCCALL_

_BELOVED SON AND FRIEND_

Stiles began to cry, pressing Claire softly into his shoulder, as if he could hide his face behind her, and just as Lydia reached out for him, he touched the stone with two fingers, and he moved on to the plot where his family lied. The stone for his mother was much more worn than his father's, where the grass was thinner. How grey and lonely it was to be nothing but a pair of stones amid other stones. Stiles didn’t retract from her when she wrapped her arms around him this time. They were going to spend the rest of the world trying to work their heads around the sinking. It felt like they had been from one end of the world to the other.

She kissed his wet cheek. She kissed Claire’s fist.

Stiles and Lydia could have been a pair of stones in the graveyard. They could have spent eternity here, with nothing but dead and dying flowers resting against their chests. Lydia didn’t think they were a pair of stones.

They were a house on a hill, near the woods and the lakes. And the flowers grew around them.


End file.
